June 15, 2026
Bird clocks and comment chaos
There Is(Ǝ) – Such That (∋)
A bizarre clock-maker charmed fans, confused skeptics, and sparked AI-writing panic
TLDR: A creator built a strange, beautiful browser tool for making artistic clocks with symbols, birds, and animated scenes. Commenters were split between loving the result and roasting the mystical wording, with some joking it sounded AI-generated before admitting the project itself is genuinely neat.
A gloriously weird little web toy called There Is(Ǝ) – Such That (∋) has landed online, letting people build dreamy, artsy clocks out of birds, stars, lines, and abstract symbols. The creator says it was born during a six-week stint at the Recurse Center, a place one commenter basically summarized as “a sabbatical where you work on random stuff and talk with people doing the same”. Honestly? That description only made the whole thing feel more mysterious.
But the real show was the comment section, where readers bounced wildly between “this is delightful” and “what on earth am I reading?” Several people admitted the opening sounded less like a product launch and more like an occult spellbook. One reader said they genuinely thought it was another outbreak of “AI psychosis,” comparing it to other recent posts with suspiciously grandiose language. Another got stuck on the title’s math symbols, asking why a symbol that usually means “contains as member” was suddenly standing in for “such that.” Translation: the project may be a cute clock generator, but the prose launched a mini grammar riot.
Still, even the confused crowd kept circling back to the same conclusion: the thing itself is cool. That tension is the whole drama here. People are side-eyeing the mystical writing style, joking that pre-AI this kind of experimental side quest would’ve taken a month, while now it feels like something that can be spun up in days. In other words, the community verdict was: bewildering intro, charming result, and just enough possible AI vibes to keep everyone arguing.
Key Points
- •The article presents a visual language for making clocks in which hours, minutes, and seconds are modeled as vectors on a canvas with radius ρ.
- •The language includes vectors, modified vectors, scalars, glyphs, habitats, and global tuning parameters that together define a clock composition.
- •The project was developed during a six-week Recurse Center batch after an initial prototype for "Impossible Day" was refined into a second prototype.
- •A node-based editor architecture uses a Loom for composition and a Weave to compile compositions into previewable p5.js sketches.
- •The implementation stack includes Svelte 5, TypeScript, Vite, Svelte Flow, p5.js, and localStorage, and exports self-contained HTML files that run entirely in the browser.